The newly launched C3.ai COVID-19 Grand Challenge is an international competition that invites participants to create new and innovative software solutions that provide data-driven insights to inform decision makers in the global fight against COVID-19.

The contest comes from C3.ai, which describes itself as a leading enterprise artificial intelligence software provider for accelerating digital transformation. It sets out to use data science techniques in new and innovative ways to generate insights that previously were neither apparent nor achievable.

In this video, Thomas M. Siebel, Founder and CEO of C3.ai. expresses his hope that it will result in insights into the behavior of the pandemic and the efficacy of mediation efforts that with help to control the spread of the disease:

The competition is open to data scientists, developers, researchers, and creative thinkers from around the world (excluding any regions subject to US Embargo). Teams can have up to five individuals and wile participants from outside the US have to be over 18 (or the age of majority in their country) minors aged 13 and over can join in subject to parental consent.  

It requires participants to use at least two datasets from the C3.ai COVID-19 Data Lake as a resource in their solutions. Launched in April 2020, this free, open source resource now consists of 40 unique datasets, making it the largest unified, federated image of COVID-19 data in the world. The Data Lake pre-establishes the important linkages in the disparate COVID-19 data sets so that researchers can easily navigate and explore the data features that may be of interest (e.g., diagnosis, age, locale, preexisting condition, etc.) and can perform sophisticated data science on those data. It therefore enables researchers and developers worldwide to build models, run analytics, develop tools, and more, without the time and effort of data wrangling. 

Submissions will be evaluated on the extent to which they derive insights, leveraging data science techniques (e.g., statistical analyses, AI/ML algorithms, optimization approaches, etc.) that were not obvious before. The seven winners will have their work published by C3.ai. There will be one Grand Prize of $100,000, two second-place awards of $25,000 each, and four third-place awards of $12,500 each. 

Registration closes on October 25 and the submission deadline is November 18. More details about the Challenge and its evaluation process will be given on September 30 in the Grand Challenge Livestream, a live presentation followed by a moderated Q&A session. After the session the event can be viewed on the C3.ai website.

More Information

C3.ai COVID-18 Grand Challenge

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